Friday 16 August 2013 07.44 EDT
First published on Friday 16 August 2013 07.44 EDT

Hometown: Lancaster.

The lineup: Adam Kaye and George Townsend.

The background: Bondax are two 19-year-olds from Lancaster - home of the (funky) drummers from Lush, Hard-Fi, Maximo Park and 3 Colours Red - who for the last year have been gaining a reputation for their light and breezy garage/house-tinged pop and soulful electronica. And if that makes them sound like the northern Disclosure, you're right. No, not Northern Exposure - that was a US TV series about a doctor in Alaska. They've supported Basement Jaxx, toured America, Canada and Europe and had the right sort of across-the-board radio play, and not just from specialist dance shows. Like the Lawrence brothers they have emerged insidiously, with coverage on blogs and a strong presence on the Hype Machine Most Popular chart.

Their music isn't bloggy and mysterious, though. It's melodic, slow-to-midtempo, commercial soul-dance music, smooth and well-produced, with vocals to the fore. The names of the singers haven't been telegraphed on their releases to date, which is fine because these aren't showcases for powerhouse performances; rather they are examples of pop-dance productions where the song as a whole is the thing, not any individual part. They've obviously spent time honing their brand of perfect pop, having spent several years messing with computers in their bedrooms to create - craft - the right sort of emotional but chilled melodic grooves. Townsend grew up listening to his dad's John Martyn records before being introduced to dubstep by a cousin, which piqued his interest in electronic music of all kinds. Kaye was into indie and rock but soon "gravitated to those acts with a tendency to sonic experimentation, with Bon Iver and LCD Soundsystem being particular favourites", according to the duo's press release. Trips to clubs using fake IDs allowed for a valuable exposure to the dance sounds du jour, but what Bondax are doing, they say, is ignoring a lot of what they learned. The feel and melody of their tracks may be in keeping with what's popular, but the pace of their downtempo disco is uniquely Bondax.

Their new single, Giving It All, is a typically Bondax affair. It's smart, grown-up soulful pop, seemingly the work of seasoned, veteran producers who know just what boxes to tick and what buttons to push for maximum joy. The anonymous singer is a slightly more conventionally soulful Aluna Francis, less sugary (and we love sugar), but it works. Their previous single, and the one that got them all the attention, was Baby I Got That, all handclaps, cut-up vocals and slow-filter-house techniques, its sample of the Gap Band's All of My Love showing where Bondax were coming from and where they were going. To be filed next to - or indeed mixed into - Mantronix's Got to Have Your Love.